Price determination from sales quotes can include accurate product pricing data based on SAP CRM or SAP S/4HANA pricing data.
Material availability check (referred to as Available To Promise - ATP) returns quantities of stock available.
Credit checks can be run to ensure the customer is in good credit standing before quoting them for products.
Free goods determination can be checked to ensure the customer isn't quoted for a material they should be getting free.
And material substitutions can be automatically changed, this way when the quote is accepted and converted to a sales order, the accurate product is picked and shipped to the customer.
Once a sales quote is accepted, it can be converted to a sales order. Any details, products, or pricing you have in the quote will be replicated to the order in SAP S/4HANA. But since SAP S/4HANA is the order fulfillment system, if you add attachments or changes to the order in SAP S/4HANA, they will not flow back and update the quote in SAP Sales Cloud.
Converting an Opportunity to a Quote
From an SAP Sales Cloud opportunity, you can create a quote. Let's take a look how to do this.
Now let's see how you can create a Sales Cloud Quote from an ERP Sales Order.
Product Recommendations in the Quote: Cross Selling
You can associate recommended products with the entered products in a sales quote. By using the Recommended Products section on the Products tab, you can select the product that will be entered and then reference any other products that should be recommended. For example: Every time a child's bike is entered on a quotation, the system should recommend a helmet and knee pads.
Upselling occurs when a product is entered and the system proposes a better quality or more expensive alternate product. For example: When a basic mountain bike is entered on a quote, the system proposes the professional mountain bike model as an alternative.
Alternatively, down selling occurs when a product is entered and the system proposes a lesser quality or less expensive alternate product. For example: A certain product is in backorder for a very long time, so when that product is entered on a quote, the system proposes a similar or lesser value product.
A user can add products to the Opportunity from proposed product recommendations. You can also replace a product by proposed up/down selling products.
Create Quotes for Recommended Products
And now, let's look at how to create quotes for recommended products.
The action Request External Pricing triggers the import of pricing data based on another system. Usually this is SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, but it could also be SAP CRM. Since pricing data has lived in these systems prior to SAP Sales Cloud, that is where it is maintained and is most accurate. Ensuring we have consistent pricing between the SAP Sales Cloud and the system that will be shipping and billing the customer is essential. Additionally, other functions can be performed, like explosion of the BOM from SAP S/4HANA or SAP CRM. This ensures that any component based pricing is calculated accurately. Pricing and quantity are editable only on the main product ID, not at the component level of the quotation.
A Bill of Materials, or BOM, is a list of all of the components that make up a finished product. For example, for a bike the components would be:
- 1 Handlebar Set
- 1 Bike Frame
- 2 Bike Tires
- 1 Bike Seat
- 2 Bike Petals
If a bill of material (BOM) is relevant to a quoted product, the BOM items will be shown in the
Sales Quote. Single level and multi-level BOM explosions are supported.
The line item numbers will increment differently to show they are BOM components and not separate line items on the quotation.
Since we don't want to sell to a customer with bad credit standing, we can check it during the quotation process. This data exists in SAP S/4HANA, but pricing request can return a status value. The Request External Pricing action returns Credit Status from the external pricing system including a message of the exceeded amount.
Credit status and exceeding the credit amount can be part of approval conditions.
The Request External Pricing action returns free goods from the external system (SAP CRM or S/4HANA).
Free Goods Determination supports EXCLUSIVE (buy ten and get one free) and INCLUSIVE (buy 10 and pay only 9) determinations.
This information would be carried forward into the sales order document, subsequent delivery document, and the customer's billing document.
Converting to a sales order now could now connect the entire big picture and send the quoted products into the sales and distribution system for shipping and billing.
The document flow will show any referenced sales documents like Leads, Opportunities, Contracts, and Quotations along with any Activities that occurred throughout the entire business process. There is now a document history that can be analyzed and reported on by several embedded reports within SAP Sales Cloud.